Obscured Madison Mansion Emerging As Historic Treasure

May 5, 1986|By William K. Stevens, The New York Times

MONTPELIER STATION, VA. — Here in the Virginia Piedmont, almost in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, sits a historic and architectural treasure that has gone largely undiscovered and unappreciated: Montpelier, the majestic 18th century mansion where James Madison grew up and later honed the concepts that made him one of the Fathers of the Constitution.

Next year, the bicentennial of the Constitution, Madison promises to become the Founding Father of the hour after two centuries in the shadows of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Madison`s friend and neighbor. And Montpelier -- relatively obscured all these decades by Jefferson`s Monticello and Washington`s Mount Vernon -- promises at last to become the center of an attention it has never really had.

But from the standpoint of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which acquired the house in 1984 and has been assessing its qualities, the Madison estate is emerging as the object of a new philosophy in the restoration of historic property.

As the trust sees it, the problem -- and the opportunity for a new and more sensitive preservation strategy -- is that Montpelier embodies not one era, but two. It was Madison`s house in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but it belonged to the du Ponts in this century. William du Pont, grandson of E. I. du Pont de Nemours, bought the estate as his home about the turn of the century, and his daughter, Marion du Pont Scott, lived there until her death in 1983.

The result is that in some respects, the Montpelier of Madison is largely submerged in that of the du Ponts, who made extensive changes and additions. Its four classical columns and Palladian-style triangular pediment with fanlight, for instance, are pure colonial and Federal. So are the triple-hung windows, similar to those at Monticello. So is the classical minitemple that decorates the ice cellar some distance away.

But many of the mansion`s 55 rooms and features date from du Pont times. The original brick exterior is now covered by a beige stucco. There is a basement exercise room that Scott built for her husband, the actor Randolph Scott. And the impressively landscaped grounds and gardens, complete with steeplechase course and race track, are almost pure du Pont.

In short, it is a building within a building, two houses in one, full of architectural complexity. Once, preservationists probably would have stripped away all later additions and encrustations in an attempt to get back to the pristine house and estate of the Madison era. To do that would deny future generations the chance to appreciate not just one historical and architectural period, but two, say spokesmen for the National Trust.

Scott willed Montpelier to the National Trust, along with a $10 million endowment. The trust accepts properties only with endowments. It acquired Montpelier in October 1984 after a long legal dispute. The resulting settlement with the du Pont family left the trust with only $2 million of the original endowment.

``We can get a 19th- and 20th-century comparison in this building if we play our cards right,`` says Frank E. Sanchis III, a vice president of the trust. ``That`s contrary to the way most preservation in the last 15 years has gone.`` Thirty years ago, he said, everything non-Madisonian would have been ripped out or torn down, and a restored ``fiction`` might have been created because of inadequate documentation.

The restoration process here promises to be a slow one. It may take 20 years, according to Sanchis.

The public, however, is not going to have to wait that long to get a look at the mansion and the 2,700-acre estate, which is four miles west of the town of Orange and about 20 miles northeast of Charlottesville. It will be opened to visitors next year beginning on the anniversary of Madison`s birth, March 16.

Since the ways of researching and restoring the mansion are still being determined, trust officials say they cannot predict the house`s condition next March. ``I just don`t know at what stage it will be,`` said George Smith, the director of the property.

Now the mansion is mostly empty, its cavernous rooms echoing hollowly to the footsteps of visitors. The Madison furnishings are gone, having been acquired by private owners around the country, and the du Pont furnishings were bequeathed to family members. The trust intends to try to regain as many of the Madison pieces as possible. The future disposition of the du Pont pieces is unclear.

The house and its architectural mysteries are now the subjects of a deliberate, long-term scholarly investigation. ``You don`t do anything to the building until you know what you`ve got,`` said Sanchis. ``Once you touch it, it`s gone.``

Each bit of material in the house -- fabric, in the vocabulary of restoration -- is to be documented, measured and photographed. ``We`ll go over it with a fine-tooth comb to find changes in fabric, flooring, wall texture, queer little blips that stick out, oddly placed windows,`` Sanchis continued. The object is to find out what was built or modified when.

The mansion was built in stages, starting in 1755, when it was begun by Madison`s father. Much of the original interior detailing of the house remains, including mantels, paneled walls, doors and jambs, and some windows. Additions by Madison, starting in 1797, brought the structure to an architectural peak in the first quarter of the 19th century.